Trump, America's First White President

[reposting from the group "Conversations on Race, Ethnicity, and Culture", which will be was cleared and closed October 1.]

Trump, America's first white president

So writes Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic. I can't do justice to his thought-provoking article with a few quotes -- read the whole thing!Or listen on your commute, at the gym, etc.; there's audio too.

(Mr. Coates advisedly uses the N-word a number of times.)

With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them....

...Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president.... He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

It turns out that conventional wisdom about Trump's appeal mainly to the white working class falls short. Running against Hillary Clinton, Trump won among white women, among white men, among lower-income and higher-income whites, among whites with college degrees and whites without, among every demographic group of white people. By slim majorities in some groups, by wide margins in others,

Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker.... From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to NASCAR dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant....

And Coates argues that people have reason to deny or ignore this unpleasantly broad support:

The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now... is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life.

The article (which is quite long, at over 8,000 words, or 50 minutes of audio at a relaxed pace) has details about racism throughout our political history, even among otherwise "progressive" people and groups, such as those working for workers' rights. A black underclass allowed working-class whites to feel kinship with wealthy whites -- I'll add, not unlike modern Republicans' reframing of working-class whites as temporarily embarrassed millionaires -- while whites considered black people "naturally" unintelligent, lazy, and otherwise unfit and undeserving.

Coates sums it up:

...the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. ...Sympathetic op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. [Black] slavery is natural.

...This is by design....

He concludes:

Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being [black].

...Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is... It does not take much to imagine another politician... now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility... doing a much more effective job than Trump.

...The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

I hate to use me as a reference but as a black man I've never fooled myself about the essential nature of a large number of whites. When they lose a job to a black person or Latino it is because of racial goals and affirmative action not that the person is clearly more qualified. When employment practices began to change in the 60s Malcom X warned blacks to stay off the carpet because someone was waiting to pull it out. The white entitlement of slavery turn into a stratifation of society with slaves at the lowest rung. However, it is no longer 1865. By 2050, Hispanics will be majority race in the US. Yes, Barack Obama made it possible for a "real" White to make it to the Oval Office as unqualified as he may be. Working for a Fortune 100 Company allowed me a good living and a first hand look at unhidden attitudes of white corporate executives. As region VP, I often went on business calls with my employees. Invariably, whoever we talked assumed I was there as a trainee until it became necessary to introduce me to make a deal. I think this piece captures what I've felt and watched for years. My grandmother always told that being black in this country meant working two times harder, twice as long to get half as much. As far as I can see, it has remained the same. I'm going on a rant so I'll stop now but my essential idea has been passed along. Don't have a racist bone in their. Oldies.

Related: an article I'm beginning to read, "The Nationalist's Delusion" (by Adam Serwer, also at The Atlantic), subtitled "Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination."

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.

While other factors also led to Trump’s victory—the last-minute letter from former FBI Director James Comey, the sexism that rationalized supporting Trump despite his confession of sexual assault, Hillary Clinton’s neglect of the Midwest—had racism been toxic to the American electorate, Trump’s candidacy would not have been viable.